A look at the Pulitzer winners

At a time when the world hopes we're not repeating the past, the Pulitzer Prizes for literature took a strong stand for the importance of remembering it. Each of these winning books looks back beyond our current challenges, sometimes at greatness, sometimes at horror, and sometimes at the preciousness of daily life.

For three of the authors, Monday's awards concluded a remarkable year of publicity and recognition. Samantha Power had already won the National Book Critics Circle award for "A Problem from Hell," her first book, which is a monumental study of political inaction in the face of genocide. Jeffrey Eugenides was on the NBCC's shortlist with his improbable novel woven through 20th-century history. And Robert Caro's study of Lyndon Johnson has now won every prize except first place on "American Idol."

With Volume I of his trilogy on the liberation of Europe during World War II, Rick Atkinson could be starting the kind of occupation of the history category that Caro has staked out in the biography category. "An Army at Dawn" earned Atkinson his third Pulitzer (The first came in 1982 at the Kansas City Times, the second in 1999 at The Washington Post.) He's currently embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq.

"Moy Sand and Gravel" is the ninth book of poetry from Paul Muldoon, a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who looks back at his childhood with unsentimental delight. British critics have been quicker to recognize the genius of this Irish-born writer, who moved to America in 1987 and became eligible for the Pulitzer by taking US citizenship.

- Ron Charles

Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex" - the story of a hermaphrodite and two generations that came before her - soars over boundaries of gender, chronology, and identity in a voice that makes genetics spellbinding, and even tries to make sibling incest sound romantic. As the narrative unfolds against war-torn Smyrna, immigration to America, and the Detroit race riots, turmoil and transformation unfurl, too, in the protagonist's private life. Cal Stephanides - born Calliope, an apparent girl - begins her tale with tantalizing contradictions: "An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me into a myth; I've left my body in order to occupy others - and all this happened before I turned sixteen." From there, Eugenides roars through time with a sweep that feels both cinematic and mythic: As the family lore unwinds, time becomes malleable, and Calliope accelerates and reverses history to dizzying, dazzling effect. "And so now, having been born," she says, "I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches." Eugenides wrangles with a destiny that mutates and recombines like restless chromosomes, in a novel of extraordinary flexibility, scope, and emotional depth. A National Book Critics Circle nominee. (529 pp.) By Christina McCarroll

The quick rout in Iraq seems downright minor next to the scale and ferocity of World War II. During nearly six years of fighting in Europe and Asia, someone died on battlefields around the world every 3 seconds - or about 27,600 a day. Almost a year after Pearl Harbor, American soldiers joined the fight on the ground against Nazi Germany in North Africa. So begins Rick Atkinson's engrossing "liberation trilogy." The Americans viewed North Africa as a distraction from the real target: a quick drive through Continental Europe on to Berlin. But the British Army, which fled the continent from Dunkirk in 1940 on any boat that could float, was more skittish about such a direct assault. As it turned out, the battle through North Africa would take almost a year from when a relatively unknown Army general named Patton landed on the Moroccan coast in November 1942, in what was then the largest amphibious assault of all time. Cooperation with Britain was often strained, and it took time for the Americans to learn how to fight effectively, but the campaign eventually elevated the United States to superpower status. Atkinson, a Washington Post reporter currently embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, shows off a journalist's eye for compelling narrative and a historian's eye for detail. The result here will make any history buff hope Atkinson gets back soon to continue work on the next installment. (704 pp.) By Seth Stern

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